1,200 Km / s. That’s fast. Fast enough to race around the entire Earth in 30 seconds. Except that it’s not a bullet, it’s a star, larger and more massive than the Earth. And a multinational team of astronomers has discovered it, and more importantly, where it came from and why it’s moving so fast. Hypervelocity stars (HVS’) are an uncommon phenomenon, since the conditions necessary to accelerate them to incredible speeds are rare. There are only about 20 HVS known, and the first was found only ten years ago. So where do they come from? There are only a...
Mars has water. This statement was in question 15 years ago, but now it’s an accepted idea backed up by proof obtained by the last three Mars rovers. Not only does Mars have water now, but it had significantly more water in the past, as evidenced by the geological features seen throughout the planet. Ancient lake and river beds, water erosion, sedimentary rocks, all things that highlight once wet areas. How much water did Mars have? Where did it all go? A team of astronomers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland has been searching for answers, by looking...
Today is the day that the Dawn Mission completes a long 7.5 year long journey that has taken it past the orbit of Mars and into the asteroid belt, studying the second largest asteroid Vesta before heading toward the dwarf planet Ceres, where it has now injected itself into orbit, as of 7:39 am EST. This marks the first time in history a spacecraft has seen a dwarf planet up close, and with New Horizons passing Pluto in July, Dawn won the race in an astronomical photo finish. The Story So Far Launching on September 27th, 2007, Dawn orbited the Sun and...
With the MESSENGER probe set to crash into Mercury this month, it’s nice to look back on some of the finest data that it gathered during its tenure orbiting the smallest planet of the solar system. The image shows the Caloris Basin, the largest impact basin on Mercury and one of the largest in the solar system. The result of a massive asteroid impact during the early days of the solar system, the 1,500 Km wide crater was filled with lava aeons ago when Mercury was geologically active (seen in orange). Large impacts have punctured the surface of the basin since...
It’s not often that we find new star clusters within our own Galaxy. Technology has been good enough to see the stars in the Milky Way for decades, and the grunt work in identifying and cataloguing local clusters is more or less finished, but occasionally we get lucky. A tiny and extremely distant globular star cluster has been found in the outskirts of the far side of our home galaxy. Currently named Kim 2, it pales in comparison to the other 150 Milky Way globular clusters, containing 10-20 times fewer stars and having less than half the stellar density. The...
Astronomy is a science that is always associated with the sky, and rightly so. But since the beginning of modern science there have been discoveries made on Earth that teach us about the formation and evolution of the Universe. As telescopes become more powerful and allow us to look deeper into space, the technology to simulate outer-space conditions here on Earth has grown significantly. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a powerful tool called the Z machine generates quick high-energy pulses of electricity, which can be used to generate X-rays and Gamma rays to be used in experiments. Outside of astronomy, the...
There is a loose hierarchy of the cosmos that repeats. Stars form clusters, and then galaxies. Galaxies form clusters, and then these form clusters of their own, called superclusters. Gravity dominates the structure of such collections, yet all we feel and see from Earth is a relatively homogeneous distribution of stars. How do we see this hierarchy? If we zoom in, looking at a patch of sky so tiny that we can’t see any stars, what do we see? This patch of sky is about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, and if we point the...
Since the Huygens probe dropped down to the surface of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, astronomers have pondered the idea of life on the distant world. With a liquid cycle not unlike Earth’s water cycle in form, but consisting of frigid liquid hydrocarbons, could a new variation of life exist, not as we know it? Jonathan Lunine, director for Cornell’s Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, is an expert on Saturn’s Moons and is a scientist on the Cassini-Huygens mission, which originally discovered the Methane-Ethane lakes on Titan a decade ago. Given a grant to study non-aqueous life, he needed help....
The thing about black holes is that they are very dense. If we took the entire 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kg of the Sun (This is the real mass of the Sun) and turned it into a black hole, it would be about 6 Km in diameter. It is theorized that there are around 100 Million Black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. But if they aren’t near a large reservoir of gas and dust, with their small size they are pretty harmless and invisible. The only way we could find them would be through their gravitational influence, which is hard to...
As the Dawn Spacecraft readies for orbit insertion only a week from now, the images coming in are getting sharper and sharper. Once the craft is fully in orbit its first task will be to map the surface of the planet in high definition. Even on the last few weeks of the journey to Ceres, we have seen increasingly clear images, and have already started asking ‘What the heck is that?’ This week’s ‘what the heck are we looking at?’ involves this apparent double bright spot on Ceres, imaged on February 19th from a distance of 46,000 Km, about an...
